NUCLEAR STRESS TESTS

I recently went to the cardiologist’s office to take a nuclear stress test. I now know what the poor people at Hiroshima might have felt!

The first thing they do is inserting a port into your arm where they can inject in some nuclear isotope into your system. They hook you up to some probes and then inset this clear liquid. Slowly the isotope gets into the system and you suddenly feel like nothing you have ever felt before.

One of the first things you sense is the feeling of pre-nausea, your feel hot, your stomach is queasy and your arm starts to hurt where the port is. You start to taste a metal taste very pronounced in the roof of your mouth. Your head starts to ache and you become restless as you lay on a table squirming to get up to walk it off and cool down. This is all on an empty stomach and no caffeine in 24 hours since your last cup.

This procedure is done in lieu of a treadmill to open up the aorta. With a treadmill it takes time to open up the aorta, while with this procedure it is opened immediately. The beauty of this is also that they inject you with an anti-isotope that removes all of the uncomfortable symptoms I just spoke about within 60 seconds.

This is good because it works around the chances of getting a heart attack on the treadmill, and so they are in better control of the situation.

Once they finish that, they make you go and wait for a half hour to start the picture taking of the heart, where they insert another type of dye or whatever it is to allow this huge camera device to read your heart as it sends signals to the machine/camera. The camera looks and acts on the same principle of an MRI. This takes 15 minutes of a slow drum like device that you are slid into on your back. All this time, your arms are over your head and after 5 minutes this becomes very painful in the arms. They slide you out and make you wait even longer for the fluids to clear, they call you back in and do it all over again. It is one of the most annoying procedures to have to go through.

Getting home you are wiped out. Your head still hurts, your shoulder joints ache and you are very tired. The headache doesn’t really go away until about dinnertime from 9:00 am in the morning when they injected that crap into you.

I slept like a baby!